I just came across of quite a nice load of installation files hogging up space at Users\Public\Documents\Winstep\Versions. Is there any reason for keeping all these files, and a way to either auto-delete older installation files, or at least only keep the last x ones?

It's a bit like Windows.old . They could be useful if the only full setup you had was an older version. You would first install that and then the updates in turn, one by one, until you reached the version you wanted.

Thanks for explaining the situation. Thought that's not really satisfactory at least for me. Wouldn't it be more consistent to offer maybe the last 5 versions somewhere on the forums or your website instead? So one could easily go back a version?That being said, your software is so stable, I didn't ever have a single need to re-install or downgrade again. Still, each and every version you ever pushed since installation fills up disk space, and I believe I had about a gigabyte worth of files on my work computer. Edit: On the most recent Insider version of Windows, older versions of Windows are automatically being deleted after ten days - such a routine in your case would help as well .

Thanks for explaining the situation. Thought that's not really satisfactory at least for me. Wouldn't it be more consistent to offer maybe the last 5 versions somewhere on the forums or your website instead? So one could easily go back a version?That being said, your software is so stable, I didn't ever have a single need to re-install or downgrade again. Still, each and every version you ever pushed since installation fills up disk space, and I believe I had about a gigabyte worth of files on my work computer. Edit: On the most recent Insider version of Windows, older versions of Windows are automatically being deleted after ten days - such a routine in your case would help as well .

All the best

Eno

What you need to understand is that the installation files saved, with the exception of the first one, are not the full installs but just the updates. So just keeping the last five versions would be completely useless.

Besides, even if you have a gig's worth of backup files there, what's a gig nowadays? Nothing. A drop in the ocean. I have data files that run into dozens of gigs and more each. Sure, it seems wasteful. Far more annoying though is the waste produced by Windows itself in the form of all sorts of demo programmes, apps, games and what have you that I for one have absolutely zero interest in or use for but Windows doesn't even let you get rid of.

Sure, I well remember the days when a gig seemed like an unimaginable amount of space and a 100 meg hard disk was considered huge, and some operating systems worked in 4-7 meg, with data files, even graphics files, also being quite tiny by today's standards. Hell, I even remember 8*K* being considered a massive amount of RAM!

But, that's the price of ever increasing Windows bloat on the one hand, and poor coding of apps where any consideration of size has long ago gone out the window. (Winstep being one of the few exceptions, being coded as tight as a duck's arse and thus incredibly compact.) Just wait until everything is fully 64 bit - a terabyte will seem like nothing.

We're caught in a vicious cycle - ever increasing amounts of data and larger and larger apps demand more and more disk space and RAM, and ever increasing and cheaper disk and RAM capacities encourage ever sloppier coding, demanding more disk space and RAM, and so on and on....

I do believe I got that point with those files being updates quite clearly . What I still don't get is the implication of a mandatory provision that this has to be the way it is right now. Yet, I might just have gotten it the wrong way. I would have thought that there would be a way around stacking up setup files on my harddrive in order to be able to restore an older version of Nexus. Some clever solution that avoids slowly filling up a drive, despite Windows being worse (but then again, you'd always find someone doing something worse than you, no matter what area). Yes, I hate Windows for visibly draining my disk space, and no, I don't want a dedicated drive only for Windows at the size of a terabyte, just because it adds and adds (unused) stuff all the time, and backs up driver files and installs loads of Visual C++ versions side-by-side, that's weird as well (even though I know why the latter happens).That being said, I do understand you don't consider an alternative, and it might well take away time from improving Nexus instead . Funny enough, a Windows function for cleaning up lead me to the folder containing the installation files for Nexus .

Well, an alternative you might consider would be, manually delete those backup files (or archive them elsewhere), and download the full install for each version as it comes along and just keep the last five generations.

My own strategy is, I keep all the installs/updates in backup, and being a belts-and-braces man also archive them elsewhere. Also, I archive the complete backup (and several others of the Winstep folders) once every six months to a year, then weed out (in the original location) whatever is not needed in the foreseeable future. (E.g., I always have a very large number of NextSTART and Workshelf backup files as I use several user accounts for theme development etc. and often use different user settings with different themes.) Also, I download all full installs and archive them. In fact, I have always backed up as well as archived all application data, important apps, and my own user data since day one of having a 'serious' 32 bit computer way back in the late 1980s, and so I still have archives going all the way back to those days. All in all,an awful lot of archives, but storage is now cheap. Sure, even then it can - and indeed does - happen that you lose some data due to a disk unexpectedly dying on you, but at least all the most important data will exist in duplicate elsewhere and the chances of two disks packing up at the same time are pretty remote.

Unfortunately, I really can't see how Jorge could provide for something like what you ask for. Of course, it would be easy enough to delete (or move/archive) these files manually, but you never know when you might need them. The only annoying thing about this is that the whole lot of the Winstep data folders have to be on the system drive and in the public folder. Personally, I'd much rather have all that stuff on at least another partition, but in this particular case it just can't be done, not since Windows 7 I think.

Hi Nexter, I am not exactly sure what your relation to Jorge and Nexus is, but it might just not matter as much . Your archival needs dating back to the 80s do seem a little strange to me, and that might explain the difference in views onto the matter here between the two of us. However, I thought this to possibly be a small thing that can be worked around, but seems more difficult than I would have expected. No harm done .

Hi Nexter, I am not exactly sure what your relation to Jorge and Nexus is, but it might just not matter as much . Your archival needs dating back to the 80s do seem a little strange to me, and that might explain the difference in views onto the matter here between the two of us. However, I thought this to possibly be a small thing that can be worked around, but seems more difficult than I would have expected. No harm done .

Nexter is just a customer whose been with Jorge for a Loooooooong time and been round these forums probably just from the beginning almost.

As far as the update come install files as Nexter says whats a gig these days, when we have 2-3TB drives. I must confess I have not even read your discussion with Nexter.

Until roughly v16.9, anything related to the hosting of the Winstep website was handled by BasicLink. This meant very restrictive storage space and bandwidth quotas, which made it pretty much impossible to archive older versions: at almost 150 MB per release, the available disk quota would be quickly used up entirely.

So, it was up to the users to archive the full setup of the versions they had. One problem with this: to save bandwidth usage for both users and Winstep, updates handled by the Winstep Update Manager only held the files that had changed between the previous and the new version. They could not be used for a FULL install.

Because older versions could not be archived on the Winstep website, the only *full* setup available at any moment was thus for the latest release.

Now imagine the following scenario: the latest release is v16.9, you purchased at v15.7 but you decided not to renew your upgrade subscription so the version you are running is still v16.5, the last you can run with your license key. Now you want to install Xtreme on another computer, but the full setup for v16.5 is no longer available from the server.

Since it is the responsibility of users to archive the full setup of the version they purchased, you still have the full setup for v15.7 around - but you were already running v16.5, and that is what you are entitled to run because you had one year of free updates.

Automatically storing the updates in the Versions folder solved this problem by allowing you to use the full v15.7 setup and then the partial updates - installing them one by one in order - to bring that version up-to-date to the last you were running (v16.5).

In the beginning of 2016 the Winstep website was moved to its own bare metal server. This meant storage space was now only restricted by the hardware itself and not by artificially imposed quotas, and therefore I started archiving the full setups of every single release.

This makes archiving the updates in the Versions folder a bit less useful, but it does not make them completely irrelevant. In the - God forbid! - unlikely event Winstep.net goes down and you no longer have access to the full setup of older versions, users can still rely on this mechanism to bring their copies up-to-date.

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